The few decades following independence are sometimes painted as a kind
of Dark Age dominated by literary censorship, insularity, sexual puritanism,
and provincial insularism. There is good reason for all these charges, but they
are only one side of the picture—the negative side. A closer and more
sympathetic study reveals remarkable variety in beliefs and attitudes, a high
degree of literary and artistic vitality, and a much more “European” view of
culture and contemporary events than it has been customary to believe. During
this period belief in the Catholic Church, was almost unquestioned and largely
uncritical. The scandals and divisions of the present had not yet emerged to
weaken this monolithic faith and bring doubt among ordinary people. Religion
guaranteed moral and hence social stability; and quite simply, the mass of
people could scarcely have got through life without it. Rural life, in
particular, was largely built around it and religious ritual was part of the
very texture of everyday existence; it was often the only gleam of spirituality
in lives which were hard and very basic. However, there were also thinking,
liberal-minded Catholics who were sincere believers but reserved the right to
judge for themselves on certain matters. Irish Catholicism between 1920 and
1950 had a good deal more intellectual vitality and sophistication than it is
fashionable to admit today. The writings of Kate O’Brien, Seán Ó Faoláin, and
many more are not wholly comprehensible without an appreciation of it.

The nationalism which carried over from the War of Independence has
similarly been attacked in our day as obsessive and monolithic. Its strength
and virulence were hardly surprising, however, since the issue of independence,
or at least Home Rule, had dominated Irish life for several generations, and
the first half of the twentieth century finally gave the people the opportunity
to square aspiration with reality. Irish nationalism was in no way unique; it
was something shared with nations such as Hungary, Finland, Czechoslovakia,
Poland and other countries which had thrown off the dominance of a powerful
neighbour. Great powers such as Britain and France could afford to take their
nationality more or less for granted, since it had been shaped and confirmed by
centuries of history. Ireland, however, was raw, unfledged and unsure, lacking
self-definition, since its traditional language almost dying and its cultural
institutions had been created largely by England or else by the Anglo-Irish
minority. The “official” culture of pre-independence Ireland was geared largely
to making people good citizens of the British Empire. The so-called Gaelic
Revival was nominally supported by the State and was given verbal support by
the people, but in practice it lacked real popular following.

In 1878 the government passed the Intermediate Education Act. It
introduced a system of ‘payment by results’. Payments of between £3 and £10
were made to schools for each student who passed the Intermediate examinations.
As a result of a campaign by girls’ schools, it was decided that girls were to
be allowed enter for the examinations. This opened secondary education to many
more students. By 1921 12,000 students had taken the examinations, and girls
accounted for 36 per cent of that figure. The great emphasis on examinations
meant that much of the teaching in schools was focussed on passing them. In
1912, Padraig Pearse, who set up his own school, described the education system
as a ‘murder machine’ which destroyed students’ minds and failed to teach them
about Irish history or culture. By 1920, Ireland had an educational system
which met its basic needs.

A large majority got a basic education which enabled them to claim to be
literate. A small proportion could get a higher education, though access to
that depended mainly on a family’s ability to pay, In 1909, Queen’s College,
Belfast became a separate Queen’s University, while Cork, Galway and the Catholic
University in Dublin were combined into a new National University. Scholarships
had been introduced by the local councils in 1900 but they remained few in
number until the 1960s. In fact, Irish Free State would change very little about
its inherited educational system until the 1960s.

In 1924 the Intermediate Education Act combined the old Boards and
Commissions into a single Department of Education under a single minister, Eoin
MacNeill. The new Department oversaw a network of national schools which
covered the country. Most of them were run by the various Churches on a parish
basis, with the Department paying some of the building costs and the teachers’
salaries. The Churches guarded their control of education jealously and this made
it difficult for governments to interfere. The primary curriculum was widened
to take in more subjects, and much stress was laid on encouraging nationalism,
particularly in the teaching of history. Irish was made compulsory. Around the
country there were many one-teacher schools with only a few pupils. This system
was expensive to run and the department tried to amalgamate them into bigger
units. Many of the buildings were old and in a poor state of repair and were
slowly replaced. In the cities many classes were badly overcrowded due to lack
of space

In 1922 attendance at school was not compulsory and only 75 per cent of
children went regularly. In 1926, compulsory attendance between the ages of six
and fourteen was introduced despite the protest of farmers who wanted cheap
labour during the harvest time. Nevertheless many children left before they
were fourteen. Only about 10 per cent of students went beyond primary school.
Secondary schools were privately owned, mostly by religious bodies. They
charged fees and even though these were low, most families could not afford
them. In 1921 and 1923 local authorities were allowed to levy a rate of one
penny in the pound to fund scholarships to secondary schools and universities.
These enabled a few clever children to get further education but the number was
small. The old system of ‘payments by results’ was abolished and replaced by a
grant for each pupil. The state agreed to pay a share of teachers’ salaries,
provided they were properly qualified. This raised the quality of teaching in
schools. The old annual examinations were replaced by two new examinations, the
Intermediate, taken after three years and the Leaving, taken two years later.
The Department set the syllabus for these examinations and this gave them some
control over what was taught in the schools.

In 1899 ‘technical schools’ had been set up to provide more practical
vocational training. By 1929 there were sixty-nine in existence, with 2,500
students. This low attendance probably reflected the low demand for
technically-trained people in Ireland. The 1930 Vocational Education Act gave
local councils the job of developing technical education. Thirty-eight
Vocational Education Committees (VEC) were set up to provide free post-primary
education with an emphasis on vocational skills, such as woodwork, metalwork,
domestic economy and commercial subjects. The vocational schools badly funded
and were not allowed to prepare students for the Leaving Certificate. As a
result, parents did not regard them highly and they would remain the poor
relations of the education system for most of this period.

In Northern Ireland the 1947 Education Act proposed a new system of
primary, secondary and third level education. Primary schooling was to end at
twelve. The year before that, pupils were to take an examination called the
‘Eleven Plus’. The 25 per cent who passed got free places in grammar schools
and could go on to third level education, for which there were generous
scholarships. The pupils who failed went to secondary modern schools. They got
a non-academic education and most of them left at fourteen or fifteen. State
schools, under the control of local councils, got full grants for building and
maintenance and their pupils did not have to pay fees. Catholics would not send
their children to these schools which as a result were almost exclusively
Protestant. Catholic-owned schools, which refused to join the State system, got
65 per cent of building grants, up from 50 per cent before the war, in spite of
protests from some sections of the unionists community. Up to 80 per cent of
their pupils would receive scholarships but the rest had to pay fees. These
reforms came into effect in 1948. Though the Catholic community resented the
lower grants, they gained a lot from them. Many Catholics were too poor to
afford much education for their children. The new system opened the chance of
secondary and university education for bright boys an girls who would not
otherwise have had the chance.

Most of the founding fathers aimed to create an Independent Ireland
which would be, in the words of Padraig Pearse, ‘not free merely, but Gaelic as
well’. Reviving the Irish language was one of the first things tackled by the
new Free State government. An extensive and expensive programme of training
primary teachers in Irish began. The Department of Education set up preparatory
colleges where Irish was the school language. Students from these schools got
priority in admissions to teacher training colleges. All infant classes had to
be taught through Irish and the language was to be used extensively in higher
classes. The teaching of other subjects like drawing, nature study, elementary
science and domestic subjects had to give way to Irish. In secondary schools Irish
became compulsory in 1928 and from 1934 students had to pass Irish in order to
pass the Certificate examinations. This was already a necessary requirement for
admission to the National University. Extra grants were given to schools where
all teaching was through Irish, and, in examinations, extra marks were given to
those who answered through that language. These measures were continued and
intensified under Fianna Fáil which, in the 1937 Constitution, made Irish the
‘first official language’ of the state. The revival policy did achieve some
results. By the 1940s the number of primary teachers qualified to teach through
Irish had risen from 10 per cent in 1922 to over 70 per cent and 10 per cent of
primary schools used only Irish in class. At secondary level nearly 64 per cent
of secondary students studied other subjects through Irish.

While on paper the number of people with a knowledge of Irish rose, the
reality was that few of them used Irish in their everyday lives. Even in
Gaeltacht areas, the number of Irish speakers continued to shrink in spite of
government grants to each Irish-speaking household. In 1926 238,000 out of a
Gaeltacht population of 427,000 were Irish speakers; by 1946 there were only
193,000 Irish speakers out of 398,000. The attempt to revive the Irish language
through the schools alone contributed to this failure. The compulsory teaching
of Irish destroyed much of the good-will towards the language which the early
revival movement had generated. The time spent on teaching Irish in schools
left less time to develop basic reading and writing skills in students. Parents
resented this and transferred their resentment to Irish. In schools most
emphasis was put on written work so that children were often able to write
Irish but not to speak it. Irish was not used in government departments, law,
courts, business or in the media. Therefore even those who enjoyed Irish and
learnt it well had few chances to use it once they left school.

Criticism of government policies towards Irish emerged during the war.
The Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO), the primary teachers’ union,
published a report in 1941 which exposed the damage the policy was doing both
to the education system and to the language. In the 1940s many of those who
loved the language realised that compulsion was damaging Irish. They tried to
recover the enthusiasm of the early revival through a number of voluntary
organisations. In 1943 An Club Leabhar was set up to publish books in Irish. A
number of new magazines also appeared, including Comhar. Literature in modern
Irish was emerging from the 1940s on. Novelists like Máirtín Ó Cadháin and
poets like Seán Ó Riordáin were producing fine works that could stand
comparison with any in English. One of the most popular books was an Béal Bocht
by the satirist, Brian O’Nolan (alias Myles na gCopaleen). It was a savage
attack on the stupidities of the revival movement. These people took a more
realistic approach to Irish than had been common in the 1920s and 1930s.
Through them Irish and the Gaelic culture associated with it, took their place
alongside other influences as part of the common inheritance of all the people
of Ireland.

In practice, most people by the 1940s continued to read and speak
English, listen to English radio programmes, sing English or American popular
songs, buy imported English products, even emigrate to England when the going
got tough economically. Irish writers relied overwhelmingly on London
publishers and London-based critics to further their reputations. Irish actors
placed high importance on a success in any of the better London theatres, and
many professional people —particularly doctors—settled in England. Talented
Irish people made careers in British newspapers, in broadcasting (the now-vanished
Third Programme had a very large Irish contingent), even in the civil service.
The reason for this was in most cases perfectly straightforward; there were not
enough career opportunities at home. Many saw emigration as a constant
brain-drain on Ireland’s resources, or the continuous loss of her brightest and
best overseas. Recent research has shown this to be largely untrue. Emigration,
whether to England, America or various parts of the British Empire, was never
really quite the cultural blood-loss which pessimistic analysts have claimed it
to be. The bulk of emigrants, both men and women, were in fact from
underprivileged and poorly educated backgrounds. This made their positions
overseas even harder, since they were unskilled.

Though the myth of the émigré Irish writer has become an established
one, the number of writers and painters who actually left the country for good
is much smaller than is generally claimed. In this sense, James Joyce is far
less typical a figure than he seems—and in any case he had left Dublin, and
Ireland, long before Irish Independence. The queue for the emigrant boats was a
harsh, undeniable fact and a living reproach to a country which seemingly could
not find jobs or roles for all its small population (for decades the number of
people in Ireland, excluding the North, did not rise much above three and a
quarter million). The effect on national morale was confidence-sapping and goes
far to explain the often embittered tone of Irish intellectuals during the
so-called de Valera Age. The refrain was almost always the same: “Can we never
stand on our own feet?” Naturally, this enhanced the appeal of other cultures,
especially France which was often seen as the homeland of artistic freedom and
intellectual emancipation.

Nevertheless, culturally Ireland did stand on her own feet to an extent
which, in retrospect, is often quite surprising. Much, of course, was inherited
from the recent past—the National Museum, the National Library, the Royal
Dublin Society, the National Gallery, the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern
Art (founded by Hugh Lane and now bearing his name), the Royal Hibernian
Academy etc. There were also the universities—Trinity College Dublin, then
regarded as the stronghold of the Protestant Ascendancy, and the various
constituent colleges of the National University of Ireland, in Dublin, Cork and
Galway respectively. Some of these institutions were rather shamefully
neglected, notably the National Museum which has only been adequately funded in
recent decades; the National Gallery, too, led virtually a subsistence life
until the 1960s. This was less the outcome of public philistinism than of sheer
poverty. Ireland was a very poor country by West European standards, which also
explains the aforementioned phenomenon of emigration. But neglected or not,
these institutions continued to exist and often exercised a potent influence.

However a body which in many ways was much more expressive of the new
Ireland was the Irish Academy of Letters, founded by the poet W. B. Yeats in
1932. After all, Ireland at this stage was known to the world primarily for its
writers, who were widely and inseparably identified with its whole history and
culture, its national soul. It included figures from at least two
generations—Yeats himself, Edith Somerville the co-author of the Irish R.M.
stories, George Bernard Shaw (who served as its first president) were among the
older figures, while Seán Ó Faoláin, Liam O’Flaherty and Frank O’Connor
represented the new generation of Irish short-story writers. The poets (apart
from Yeats, that is) included Austin Clarke, F. R. Higgins, Padraic Colum,
Seamus O’Sullivan; and the dramatists were represented by Lennox Robinson, T.
C. Murray, and Sir John Ervine. The most obvious absentee was James Joyce, then
living in Paris, who had cold-shouldered the entire project from the start.
Sean O’Casey, Ireland’s leading playwright, also declined membership—he was
already living in England and had been particularly disenchanted with Ireland
since the Abbey Theatre had rejected his First World War play “The Silver
Tassie”. In spite of these notable absences, however, the roll-call of the new
body was a formidable one and showed conclusively the depth of talent in
contemporary Irish writing.

The rejection of O’Casey’s play, which raised much dust at the time, was
an ominous indicator that the generation of Yeats and his patroness-friend Lady
Gregory was ageing and beginning to lose contact with a younger
generation—though O’Casey himself was by no means a young man and did not make
his mark as a playwright before middle age. The Abbey had been virtually the
flagship for the whole Literary Revival early in the century; its gradual
hardening into an official and increasingly conservative institution was a sign
of the times. Yeats’s mythic themes and philosophy no longer commanded the
readership or audience they had earlier in the century, even if Yeats’s
personal and artistic prestige was undiminished. A drier, more realistic and
social-minded mentality was beginning to take shape, typified by the new school
of fiction-writers. These writers saw around them not an Island of Saints and
Scholars, nor one populated by spiritual presences and the ghosts of legendary
heroes, but a rather prosaic small country bogged down in local politics and
class tensions and the hard necessity to scrape a living.

And politics and economics apart, there was a new (though not entirely
new) and unpleasant factor of increasing power in cultural life—official literary
censorship. The Censorship of Publications Act had been passed by the
Oireachtas in 1929 and for rather more than three decades was to play a big
role in national cultural life. Yeats himself had anticipated it and his
Academy of Letters was to some extent an attempt to fight censorship along
organised lines and with professional solidarity. In fact, it achieved little
in that field and the long-drawn war against the literary censors was fight
mainly by lonely and isolated figures. Irish censorship is probably the most
harped-upon feature of the first forty years of national independence—in fact,
many intelligent people base, or at least used to base, their whole view of the
period on it.

In fact, literary censorship was much more a feature of life in most
Western countries than we think—the liberation which came with the 1960s has
changed our perspectives radically on this matter. There was active literary
censorship in Britain and America—D. H. Lawrence suffered badly under it in his
homeland and even long after he had left it. Other American novelists such as
Sinclair Lewis were frequently denounced as immoral, or, what was worse in the
eyes of the common man, amoral. Continental nations tended to be freer in their
approach, yet the writings of Colette shocked large sectors of contemporary
France, and several leading German writers between the two world wars were
involved in furious controversy over their “decadent” views. Otto Dix, a
leading German painter of the period, was twice in court to answer pornography
charges. Ireland, then, was by no means unique in having legal censorship; what
was special was the virulence with which the laws were applied. There was a
kind of moral fundamentalism in the national mind which grew paranoid at the
thought of “letting in foreign filth”. Irish writers who offended in a similar
way were officially regarded as agents of decadence and social disintegration.
They were seen as striking at the roots of family life and moral decency. In
1942 the book The Tailor and Ansty was banned. It was a collection of stories
and sayings which an English writer, Eric Cross, had recorded from a country
tailor and his wife. They were exactly the kind of people romanticised by de
Valera, but in real life their language was too broad and racy for the tender
sensibilities of the censors. After the banning, their book was burned in their
home village and the old couple humiliated.

It is a curious aspect of the censorial mind that the writings of Joyce
escaped its net, at least in Ireland; in Britain copies of his work were seized
and burnt by Customs, while in America his best-known book, “Ulysses,” was
banned for several years. Joyce, safe in his Continental exile, was relatively
little affected by any of this. The real sufferers were the courageous Irish
writers who remained at home and tried to fight obscurantism and stupidity on
their own ground, often risking public opprobrium and financial loss. Kate
O’Brien, Austin Clarke, Benedict Kiely, Seán Ó Faoláin and his writer-in-arms
Frank O’Connor, all fell foul of the censor at some time in their careers. Many
“foreign” writers were banned too, of course, including Thomas Mann, Ernest
Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, Scott Fitzgerald, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence,
Robert Graves, Evelyn Waugh, John Cowper Powys, even Somerset Maugham. This did
not, of course, prevent those who really cared about literature—particularly
contemporary literature—from getting and reading the books they wanted.
Nevertheless it was a deprivation for many ordinary readers who were excluded
from discovering, in their own right, much of the significant writing of their
age.

There was little or no censorship of ideas and debate on topical
issues—including that of censorship—was often keen and outspoken. The period of
censorship coincided with the peak years of the great Irish literary magazines:
the long-lived Dublin Magazine edited by the poet-critic-scholar Seamus
O’Sullivan, the very influential Bell launched by Seán Ó Faoláin who was its
first editor, Envoy edited by John Ryan, and Irish Writing which was largely
Cork-based. These were organs of opinion which were read and mulled over—though
not necessarily agreed with— by thinking or well-informed people. These
publications sometimes angered or offended political or clerical reactionaries,
but they were not as a rule interfered with. Much of this controversy is
hopelessly dated for contemporary readers, but its intellectual sharpness and
verbal style is undeniable. Irish newspapers, too, often carried articles and
letters by the university and literary intelligentsia which pulled no punches
and were erudite and elegantly written, with no “talking down”.

Newspapers, too, were aware of their cultural duties, even if their
definitions of these tended to vary a good deal. The Irish Times, sometimes
called “the Old Lady of Westmoreland Street” because its front office was on
that street, assumed a special role from the 1930s onwards. Previously it had
been very much the organ of the Protestant and Anglo-Irish Establishment and
its long-time editor, John Healy, was a confirmed Unionist. A major shift
occurred when R. M. Smyllie, generally called “Bertie” Smyllie, succeeded him
as editor and began to give his newspaper a totally different character and
reputation. He consciously courted the Dublin intelligentsia, particularly the
writers, who in turn were flattered to be noticed and many of them became his
personal friends. Poets, in particular, came into his circle and Austin Clarke,
F. R. Higgins, Padraic Fallon were all regular contributors—not merely of
poems, but of articles and book reviews. The Irish Times, once the reading of
foxhunting or racegoing Anglo-Irish county types, became to a great extent the
organ of the Irish intellectual. Its star columnist, however, was the civil
servant who wrote under the aforementioned pen-name Myles na Gopaleen, and
published novels under the name Flann O’Brien, but in private life was simply
Brian O’Nolan. His comic/satiric touch made him probably the greatest Irish
journalist of the mid-century and his unique column, Cruiskeen Lawn, was read
as avidly by ordinary Dubliners as it was by literary folk. It was also read,
sometimes with fear or anger, by the various public figures who came under the
sting of Myles’s satire.

The other Dublin-based daily newspapers, the de Valera-owned Irish Press
and the neo-Redmondite Irish Independent, did not have any equivalent to him,
nor indeed did any newspaper in the British Isles—though the writings of
“Beachcomber” (in private life J. B. Morton , who incidentally was a lover of
things Irish and had an Irish wife) offer a parallel and may indeed have
supplied Myles with some of his ideas. The Irish Independent never found—or
possibly did not seek—any equivalent to Myles na gCopaleen. Nevertheless, in
John D. Sheridan it had a humorous columnist on a rather lower level, but by no
means a contemptible one. He was in fact something of a national institution
for entire decades, and collections of his articles were published regularly
and were bought and read in England and America as well as his homeland.

The centre of cultural and intellectual activity was of course Dublin,
but it did not possess a monopoly. Cork, in particular, had a flourishing
intellectual life and Radio Éireann maintained a separate studio there which
was widely listened to in the South. The short-story school of O’Connor and Ó
Faoláin was essentially a Cork phenomenon—following in the footsteps of their
mentor, the writer and academic Daniel Corkery—and proved a valuable
counter-thrust to Dublin intellectual egocentricity. While both men were
cosmopolitan in outlook and influenced by Russian and French models, they were
also strongly regional in their subject matter and social thinking. Cork always
possessed a small but committed cultural elite, who included personalities such
as the sculptor Seamus Murphy, the scholar/poet/academic Sean Ó Tuama, and the
important Gaelic poet Seán Ó Riordáin. University life, too, had plenty of
vitality and Cork produced its own respected newspaper, the Cork Examiner.
Cork, in fact, proved to be in fact what it had always claimed to be—the
capital of the South, independent of Dublin or even London. Without this
regional vitality, Ireland would have much the poorer in almost every respect.
Though the contribution of Galway and Limerick has been largely ignored, the
former produced two outstanding Gaelic writers in the poet Máirtin Ó Direáin
and the fiction-writer Máirtin Ó Cadháin, as well as various distinguished
scholars and academics. Limerick, however, did not acquire university status
until much later and its intellectual life probably suffered from its
intermediate position between Cork and Galway.

In the early years of the century the so-called Literary Revival or
Irish Renaissance had produced such European figures as Yeats in poetry, George
Moore in fiction, Shaw, Synge and O’Casey in the drama, as well as a whole
cluster of lesser but respected writers such as Padraic Colum, James Stephens,
and others whose reputations have rather faded but were strong at the time.
However, O’Casey went into exile in England only a few years after
independence, while James Joyce, easily the most considerable figure of the
generation after Yeats, had left Dublin years before for the Continent and
never came back. Both Moore and Shaw had lived abroad for many years. This was
a considerable emigration-drain, which has helped to shape the widespread
belief that the cream of Ireland’s writers and intellectuals were forced into
exile by philistinism and narrow-mindedness in their homeland.

There is obviously a solid core of truth in this, but what is often
overlooked is that many or most of these distinguished literary emigrants left
before the foundation of the new State. O’Casey is an obvious exception, but he
was motivated less by censorship or chauvinism than by Yeats’s rejection of
“The Silver Tassie” for production at the Abbey Theatre. It was a deep,
personal hurt, almost a sense of betrayal, since O’Casey greatly respected
Yeats and regarded him as a protector and almost a father-figure. In due
course, he transferred his allegiance to Shaw, who had preceded him to
voluntary exile in England decades before. The episode is a complicated one,
and too much may have been made of it; nevertheless it has helped to solidify
the worldwide impression that after the great days of the Literary Revival,
Ireland became too small and narrow—too provincial—for any major writer or
artist to feel at ease in. Those authors who stayed at home are generally
regarded as essentially second-rate figures of little more than local interest.
This belief has grown to the stature of a myth and is still common in literary
textbooks, especially those written by English or American academics and
critics. The playwright novelist Samuel Beckett’s departure from Ireland during
the Thirties has helped to strengthen it, and like his master Joyce, Beckett
wrote his most significant works on foreign soil.

As a result of this myth, or rather distortion, fine poets such as
Austin Clarke (even though he had spent a lengthy period in London), Patrick
Kavanagh, Padraic Fallon, Patrick MacDonogh, found it hard to obtain a hearing
outside their own frontiers, even if they were sporadically included in English
anthologies. Much the same is true of various talented dramatists and
novelists, though not of the short-story writers who obtained a strong foothold
in America—Benedict, Lavin and others. At the beginning of the century Irish
literature had commanded world attention. In the decades after independence it
more or less slid out of the reckoning internationally, with certain exceptions
who were not, in any case, necessarily the most significant talents.

It seems an inescapable fact that the slow alienation of England, in
particular, from Irish writing of the new generation had a good deal to do with
the fact that the Anglo-Irish period of literature was past or passing.
Somerville and Ross, for instance, represented the type of so-called Ascendancy
writers with whom British readers were perfectly at home, but they were much
less attracted to the school of “peasant” writing which succeeded it. This is,
of course, a very broad generalisation and is subject to many qualifications.
However, the fact remains that the Literary Revival had been largely the
creation of Irish Protestants with an upper-middle-class or “county”
background—Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore, Synge. Anglo-Ireland, however,
went into slow decline after 1923, for reasons which were social and economic
rather than political or cultural. A new, raw, often socially insecure Ireland
was succeeding them, even in professions which previously they had dominated
such as business, medicine and the law. Much so-called Irish nationalism, in
fact, was really a class struggle, and after independence a new “native” middle
class quite rapidly emerged, most of them the children of rural smallholders or
of small-town shopkeepers and tradesmen. Similarly, many of the old country
estates were broken up into small holdings on which a new type of farmer eked
out a subsistence living—the family background of Patrick Kavanagh in Monaghan,
for instance, forms a typical part of this picture. The Big House celebrated by
Somerville and Ross, and by George Moore, was in eclipse and a new type of
novel or play depicting small-town or peasant life was increasingly prominent.
Those readers in England and elsewhere who still expected Irish writers to
produce sophisticated, ultra-witty stage comedies a la Wilde or Shaw, or
dashing novels of the hunting field, or delicately musical, Celtic Twilight
lyricism, were to be disappointed.

The world depicted by O’Connor and Ó Faoláin in their fiction, and by T.
C. Murray was low-keyed and regional, petit-bourgeois, often dully respectable
and morally inhibited. Its humour, too, was generally homespun or laboured and
for the most part did not export well—the typical Abbey Theatre rural farce
would have cut no ice with a West End audience in London, or with the average
Broadway theatregoer in New York. Not surprisingly, foreign readership often
baulked at the literature of post-independent Irish society, or simply left it
alone. Ireland had no Evelyn Waugh, no Noel Coward, no W. H. Auden or John
Betjeman, nor indeed any real equivalent to the new school of urban
sophistication which had emerged both in Britain and in America. Apparently now
solidly rural and monolithically Catholic, it already seemed to most cultivated
Englishmen to be an alien culture, even a backward-looking one. England became
increasingly dominated by the so-called “Thirties Poets” and by the new
American literature, both in prose and verse.

James Joyce in many ways stands outside this discussion, since he had
been an exile from the age of twenty and made only one brief return visit to
Dublin, in 1912. He showed little interest in the contemporary English literary
scene and was almost entirely geared towards Latin Europe. The greater part of
Joyce’s life was divided between France and Italy, and his death in Switzerland
in 1941 was rather fortuitous, since he went there basically as a refugee from
the second World War. Though invited several times to America, he never went
there—which seems rather ironic when we consider his enormous prestige there
and the number of Americans who have studied and written about his
work—including his biographer, Richard Ellmann.

Joyce is often spoken of as the outstanding victim of Irish cultural
chauvinism and censorship. His works, in fact, were never banned in Ireland and
his early books, the short-story collection Dubliners and the autobiographical
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, were read enthusiastically by two
generations of Irish people. Ulysses, by contrast, was considered scandalous
and immoral, yet it was ignored by the Censorship Board and could—though with
some difficulty and circumspection be bought in the better bookshops. The
tradition that he was virtually ignored by literary Dublin for most of his
later career is almost a travesty of the facts—he had a considerable influence
on younger writers including not only Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien, but on
figures as far apart as the dramatist Dennis Johnston and the poet Austin
Clarke. In turn, Joyce followed developments in his homeland from afar,
including literary and intellectual trends, and he relied on friends to feed
him information, press cuttings, anecdotes and other materials which might be
fed into the witch’s cauldron of his style. In 1951—by which time, of course,
he was long dead—the magazine Envoy devoted an entire issue to him, and in the
same decade the Martello Tower in Sandycove, where the first chapter of
“Ulysses” opens, began to be a place of artistic pilgrimage. Contrary to what
is so often said, his fellow-countrymen, or at least an educated minority of
them, were fully cognisant of his world stature as a novelist and innovator.

Joyce, in short, became an organic part of Irish literature from the
1920s onwards, and in the decade after his death he became almost a symbol of
revolt for younger writers in reaction against the Celtic Twilight on the one
hand, and the rural school(s) of writing on the other. This new generation
consciously sought an “international” tone, in contrast to the self-conscious
nationalism of much Irish writing between the world wars, and in opposition to
the still-powerful rural writers it laid stress on urban themes and a big-city
sensibility. In this, of course, they were in line with their contemporaries in
Britain - where the Georgian poets with their rural subjects were in eclipse -
and in America, where folksy writers such as Willa Cather were now out of
fashion and New York called the tune. However. Joyceanism was something special
and unique - it never really took root in England, for instance, and many of
Joyce’s keenest followers and admirers were either French, or Russian like
Andrey Bely, or German like Doblin. (On the other hand, he made a strong appeal
to Welsh writers such as David Jones and John Cowper Powys, and to Scots such
as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid).

For many years indeed, for many decades—there was a belief that
Ireland’s contribution to the visual arts was far inferior to her literature,
in fact not remotely comparable to it. Irish painting and sculpture were seen
as belonging in a provincial British context, or else as third-rate and
third-hand borrowings from France, then the most prestigious country in Europe
(and the world) in the visual arts. It is only in the past two decades that
this negative, even patronising attitude has been effectively challenged.

In fact, the Literary Revival or Renaissance was paralleled by a very
vigorous school of Irish painters and sculptors—though the term “school” might
be rather misleading, since these artists were all individual figures who
pursued separate paths and never banded together as the Impressionists had done
in France. For instance, John Butler Yeats, father of the poet, was a portrait
painter of genius, as is now generally acknowledged, who has left us an
unequalled gallery of the literary talent of his time including his son W. B.
Yeats, George Moore, Synge, Padraic Colum, George Russell and many more. His
painter-contemporaries included the great landscapist Nathaniel Hone, who had
trained in France, the sensitive genre artist Walter Osborne, and John Lavery,
who had grown up in Scotland and spent his formative years as a painter in
France. A little later, William Orpen showed himself to be immensely skilled,
versatile and prolific in about every genre from portraiture to still life. By
the Twenties, however, Hone and Osborne were dead, John Butler Yeats had for
years been an exile in New York, and Orpen had settled in England. Irish art
had lost many or most of its outstanding figures and Hugh Lane, the great
dealer, patron and founder of the gallery in Dublin that now bears his name,
had been lost on board the Lusitania in 1915.

There can be little doubt that the dominant figure in Irish painting of
the twentieth century is Jack B. Yeats (1869-1957). The son of an outstanding
painter and the brother of Ireland’s pre-eminent poet, he would have had every
excuse if he had felt overwhelmed by their combined gifts and as a result had
failed to realise his full potential as an artist. And in fact Jack Yeats was a
very modest, man, private and unassuming where his poet-brother was very much a
public figure His rise as a painter was slow and though his early work has
plenty of vitality, his great period as a colourist did not begin until the
late 1920s, when he was already middle-aged. His work is a unique fusion of
realism and imagination, of the everyday and the visionary, and his nervous
brushstrokes and broken, irridescent colour were far in advance of their time
particularly in relatively provincial Ireland. However, Yeats also had a strong
following in England, he was known to American buyers, and France thought
highly enough of him to award him the Legion of Honour. Today his fame is
worldwide and he ranks with the great figures of his generation in France and
Germany.

The Royal Hibernian Academy, under the presidency of Dermod O’Brien, had
been very much under the influence of William Orpen, who even after his
voluntary exile from Ireland had continued to be powerful as a teacher and
personality. His followers and pupils included artists of genuine calibre such
as Leo Whelan, James Sleator, and Frank Tuohy; another, more contentious one
was Sean Keating. This meant, in effect, that the RHA came to stand more and
more for a turn-of-the-century Realist style which twentieth-century Modernism
had made look increasingly outmoded. O’Brien himself , though an able painter,
was a rather backward-looking figure who was largely hostile to the new trends,
with the result that the Academy became equated in the eyes of a younger, more
rebellious generation with head-in-the sand reaction. In 1943, in the very
depths of the second World War, a number of independent-minded people got
together and formed the Irish Exhibition of Living Art which was mildly
Modernist and was strongly influenced by the hugely prestigious School of
Paris. Figures associated with it included Louis le Brocquy, Norah McGuinness,
the sculptor Oisin Kelly and others. This generation, if it can be called that,
was able to combine the formal and other advances of European Modernism with a
strongly Irish quality of imagination.

Much or most of the activity outlined above took place against the
background of financial stringency and in a country with a small population
with relatively few cultural traditions outside folk ones. It is therefore hard
to sustain the charge that Ireland during the two world wars was a cultural and
intellectual backwater, taking refuge behind tariff walls and a stringent,
unimaginative censorship. No doubt there were many disappointments and
frustrations, particularly on a personal level, yet there was always a core of
committed, disinterested people who were able to keep the flag of Irish culture
flying. Contrary to the hostile myths, Ireland’s creative nerve did not desert
it, nor did philistinism and reaction crush the energy which the Literary
Renaissance had first set in train. Literature continued to produce remarkable
talents, the theatre was vital if not hugely creative, a new generation emerged
in the visual arts, it was the golden age of the Irish literary magazine,
journalism and broadcasting (on radio—television did not come until the
Sixties) maintained a high level. From being little more than a province in the
multi-lingual British Empire, Ireland became fully a nation with a culture of
its own.

13. Religion—North and South

Amid the political turmoil of 1912-22, Irish
Catholics and Protestants shared one concern: a fear of being a religious
minority. The partition of Ireland in the early 1920s led to the formation of
two states in which majorities triumphed: the Irish Free State with its strong
Catholic identity and Northern Ireland with an equally strong Protestant
identity. Although the Government of Ireland Act (1920) which established the Northern Ireland
state and the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) which led to the Irish Free State
included similar articles prohibiting discrimination on the basis if religion,
the reality was less than ideal.

Protestants had voiced their fears very clearly
during the Home Rule debate of 1912. One of the highlights of the Unionist
campaign was the signing of Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant on 28 September
1912; this was a pledge to resist Home Rule which, it argued, would be
‘subversive of our civil and religious freedom.’ The Church of Ireland,
Presbyterian and Methodist churches issued strong statements against Home Rule.
In addition to expressing political and economic concerns, they objected to the
Catholic Church’s influence on Irish politics and feared that a Dublin
government would promote Catholic beliefs. They resented the Catholic Church's
demand that the children of mixed marriages be brought up as Catholics.

On the Catholic side, proposals to exclude the
North-East from Home Rule met with considerable opposition. The Catholic Church
raised strong objections to the British Government’s proposal for Home Rule
with partition in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising: Cardinal Logue declared it
would be better to wait fifty years than to accept the proposal. Bishops and
priests expressed their objections in letters to the press. The bishops feared
that Catholic schools would suffer financially under a Belfast administration.
They also feared that Catholics would be treated as second class citizens. John
Redmond’s willingness to contemplate partition even as a temporary measure
contributed to the bishops’ disillusion with his party. When partition loomed again in 1920, Bishop
Charles McHugh of Derry declared, ‘to become serfs in an Orange Free State
carved out to meet the wishes of an intolerant minority, to this we will never
submit.’

14. Revolution in Ireland

The outbreak of political violence in Ireland
raised questions regarding the morality of armed struggles for independence.
The Catholic Church had traditionally condemned armed rebellion as immoral and
opposed membership of secret oathbound organisations. The 1916 Rising clearly
challenged these views and a number of individual priests and bishops spoke out
against it. The bishops considered a joint statement of condemnation but in the
end issued none. Some of their private
correspondence indicates considerable soul searching. Despite the Church’s
traditional hostility to political violence, some of the rebels themselves were
openly quite devout. In the run up to the Rising, Patrick Pearse presented
commitment to the armed struggle in religious terms: at the graveside of Fenian
Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in 1915 he had declared that ‘splendid and holy causes are served by
men who are themselves splendid and holy’. During the Rising
rebels recited the Rosary on the roof of the General Post Officer (GPO). Those
condemned to death seem to have been satisfied that they were about to enter
into eternal glory and were depicted as martyrs subsequently. In fact, the
rebels’ piety motivated Countess Markievizc to convert to Catholicism after the
Rising. Further religious fervour was evident at the end of Thomas Ashe’s life
in 1917; Ashe, president of the IRB supreme council, died as a result of botched
forced feeding in Lewes jail. Before his death he wrote ‘Let me carry your
cross for Ireland, Lord’. The attendance of large numbers of clergy at his
funeral reinforced the image of his martyrdom.

By 1918 the Catholic Church had come to accept Sinn
Féin as representing the majority. Faced
with the prospect of unionist victory in eight northern constituencies if the
Catholic majority vote were split between the Irish Party and Sinn Féin,
Cardinal Logue allocated four constituencies to each of the parties to contest.
The War of Independence raised serious issues; some bishops and priests
condemned acts of violence strongly, but the policies of the government and the
actions of the Black and Tans were also denounced. Only one bishop – Daniel
Coholan, bishop of Cork – went so far as to excommunicate those involved in
ambushes, kidnapping and murders; this was in the context of intense IRA
activity and severe reprisals in his area. The death of Cork Lord Mayor Terence
MacSwiney on hunger strike aroused widespread sympathy; like Ashe, he was
perceived as a martyr. When the conflict ended and the Anglo-Irish Treaty was
signed, the bishops in general were relieved, though the northern bishops were
disappointed that the newly formed Northern Ireland parliament could opt out of
the Free State. The Catholic Church supported the new Dublin government, and
prompted by the government, issued a strong condemnation of those who fought
against the state in the civil war. Thereafter the
Catholic Church’s overt involvement in party politics declined, but in 1931 the
bishops issued a statement condemning
the IRA and Saor Éire, a left-wing republican organisation. This statement, like the bishops’
condemnation during the civil war, was prompted by the government.

15. A Catholic State

The Irish Free State celebrated its Catholic
identity. The centenary ofCatholic
Emancipation in 1929 was marked by a sense of religious and political
achievement. About 300,000 people attended a
pontifical Mass in the Phoenix Park. The
Catholic Emancipation Centenary Record, edited by Myles Ronan, presented
essays on church history; one declared that relations between Ireland and the
Papacy had remained unbroken for almost 1,500 years. In the same year the Irish government
established diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Religious and political
leaders participated in the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, held in Dublin to
mark the presumed fifteenth centenary of St Patrick’s arrival in Ireland; this
was the first major international event to be held in the Irish Free State. The
Irish Army also played an important ceremonial role at the event. About one
million people attended Mass in Phoenix Park, after which thousands processed
along the quays to benediction at a specially constructed altar on O’Connell
Bridge.

Early political leaders of the Irish Free State
were committed Catholics. Successive governments legislated to protect the
moral values of the time. In 1925 the Cumann na nGaedheal government led by
W.T. Cosgrave decided against permitting divorce through a private bill in
parliament, as had been the case before independence. This followed
consultation with the archbishop of Dublin and a statement from the hierarchy.
The government passed an Intoxicating Liquor Act in 1924 to reduce the opening
hours of public houses; another act in 1927
further regulated opening hours and addressed issues regarding liquor
licences. Sexual immorality was another issue of concern: a Censorship of Films
Act was passed in 1923 and the
Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 banned indecent and obscene literature,
as well as literature advocating contraception. This Act tackled a longstanding
Irish Catholic concern regarding ‘evil literature’. Legislation to protect
public morality continued when Fianna Fáil, led by Eamon de Valera, came to
power in 1932. A Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 1935 banned the importation of
contraceptives. Under the Public Dance Halls Act of 1935, a licence was
required to hold a public dance. As historian Dermot Keogh has noted, de Valera
did not follow the bishops’ suggestion that girls should not be permitted to go
to dances unless accompanied by parents! Nevertheless, a more alarming though
less publicised issue was the high rate of sexual offending, particularly
against young girls, as indicated in the evidence of garda commissioner Eoin
O’Duffy and others to the Carrigan Committee, which deliberated in 1930-31 on
sexual offences and possible legislative remedies. In their desire to avoid ‘unsavoury’ public debates
on the report the government may have unwittingly reinforced the culture of
secrecy that facilitated sexual offences.

Catholic moral values and beliefs received further
protection when a new constitution, Bunreacht
na hÉireann, was introduced in 1937. In preparing the constitution, de
Valera consulted Fr John Charles McQuaid (soon to become archbishop of Dublin),
and received proposals from Fr Edward Cahill S.J. and fellow Jesuits. De Valera
used this advice selectively. The constitution
included strong protection for the family and a ban on divorce. It recognised
the ‘the
special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the
guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens’ as well
as other churches in Ireland at that time. This fell short of recognition of
the Catholic Church as the one true church, as some would have preferred. Its
emphasis on women’s work in the home also generated controversy at the time and
later.

Catholic organisations and religious activities had
a widespread appeal during this period. The Pioneer Total Abstinence
Association attracted thousands of members and promoted devotion to the Sacred
Heart. Sodalities and confraternities, such as the Sacred Heart Confraternity,
the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin and the Children of Mary were popular. The
Legion of Mary, founded in Dublin 1921 and led by Frank Duff, combined devotion
to Mary with social concern, initially focusing on counteracting Protestant
attempts to convert Catholics, persuading prostitutes to lead more meaningful
lives and helping the homeless. Devotion to our Lady of Lourdes grew during the
1930s, reflecting international attention to Lourdes in this decade when the
75th anniversary of the Virgin’s apparition in Lourdes was celebrated. This
period also witnessed considerable interest in pilgrimages to Lourdes and Rome.
Contingents from the Garda Síochána visited Rome in 1928 and Lourdes in
1930. In the same decade pilgrimages to
Knock increased.

As the economic depression of the 1930s led to
hardship in Ireland and elsewhere, attention turned to social problems. The St.
Vincent de Paul Society, which had spread to Ireland from France in the
nineteenth century, played an important role in providing assistance to the
poor. In 1931 The encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931) presented Pope Pius XI’s
views on social issues. Rejecting both communism and capitalism, the Pope
called for vocational organisations to represent particular industries and
occupations, and hoped that employers and workers would work in harmony in
these organisations. Irish study groups examined the Pope's ideas and religious
journals discussed social problems. Vocationalism attracted such attention that
the government set up a commission to consider it but proved unenthusiastic
about its recommendations.

17. Ireland and the Catholic World

The national press and religious publications kept
the Irish public informed of the problems facing Catholics in the wider
Catholic World. Irish Catholics heard with concern of hostility towards
Catholics in Mexico, Spain and the Soviet Union and were quick to compare the
difficulties facing Catholics abroad with those endured by their forefathers in
Ireland. Events in Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9 attracted
particular attention. The Irish Christian Front was formed to combat communism
in Ireland and sent aid to the soldiers of General Franco who had ousted the
left-wing government. About 700 men led by Eoin O’Duffy travelled to Spain to
fight for General Franco. A smaller group of about 200, led by Frank Ryan went
to fight on the Republican side.

The early decades of Irish independence also
witnessed increasing missionary activity. From the mid nineteenth century the
Irish Catholic Church had sent large numbers of priests abroad, mainly to
minister to Catholics in the English-speaking world. By the early twentieth
century the Irish diaspora was better able to provide its own clergy and the
focus of Irish Catholic missionary activity switched to the developing world. New missionary
organisations emerged. The first of these, the Maynooth Mission to China (later
known as St Columban’s Foreign Mission Society) was formed in 1916. In the 1920s and 1930s Bishop Joseph Shanahan
played in key role in Irish missionary expansion in Nigeria, establishing the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary,
based in Killashandra and St Patrick’s Missionary Society, based in Kiltegan as
well as influencing Mother Mary Martin who founded the Medical Missionaries of
Mary. Nor was missionary work restricted to religious orders: Edel Quinn
worked to extend the Legion of Mary in East Africa. Missionary magazines, often
distributed through schools increased Irish awareness of the work of
missionaries abroad.

18. The Protestant Minority in the
Irish Free State

The Protestant Minority in the Irish
Free State

Year

Church of Ireland

Presbyterian

Methodist

1911

249,535

45,489

16,440

1926

164,215

32,429

10,663

1946

124,829

23,870

8,355

The Protestant population of southern Ireland declined sharply during the
period between the 1911 and 1926
censuses. This was partly due to Protestant casualties in the First World War
and the exodus of the British armed forces after independence. Other
protestants left on account of intimidation. The motivation for attacks on
Protestants has been the subject of considerable debate since the publication
of Peter Hart’s The IRA & its
Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923 (1998). Undoubtedly, attacks increased in
early 1922 in retaliation for violence against Catholics in Belfast. Church of
Ireland archbishop of Dublin J.A.F. Gregg led a delegation to meet
representatives of the Provisional Government, and asked if Protestants were to
be permitted to remain in the country. The government although sympathetic, was
unable to prevent further attacks. During the civil war a number of Protestants
whom W.T. Cosgrave had appointed senators had their houses burned to the
ground. A further wave of intimidation and attacks on Protestant property was
to occur in 1935 in response to an outbreak of sectarian violence in Belfast.

Such attacks were exceptional and met with
government disapproval in 1922 and in 1935. Protestants who were on average better off than
Catholics, had a certain standing in society. The Irish Times represented the Irish Protestant unionist perspective,
though this was to change over the next few decades. Trinity College, Dublin,
remained a Protestant institution as the Catholic Church disapproved of
Catholics attending it. Southern Protestants maintained close links with
Protestants in Northern Ireland as the main Protestant churches continued to
function on an all-Ireland basis. Neveretheless, they had causes for concern,
exacerbated by their dwindling numbers. The Catholic Church’s requirement that
children of mixed marriages be brought up as Catholics encouraged Protestants
to remain apart, but it proved difficult to maintain separate schools where
Protestant communities were shrinking. The Church of Ireland’s Board of
Education repeatedly criticised the state’s emphasis on Irish language in the
education system. A further grievance was the fact that Irish language texts
reflected Catholic beliefs. In any case,
the Irish language had little appeal for
Protestants, though there were notable exceptions such as Ernest Blythe,
government minister from 1922-1932 who authored a number of books in Irish, and
Douglas Hyde, founder member of the Gaelic League and first president following
the creation of that position as head of state under the 1937 constitution. The
formation of Coláiste Moibhí as a preparatory school for the Church of Ireland
teacher training college helped to reduce the cultural gap.

Protestant Churches shared some of the the Catholic
Church’s concerns for the protection of moral values, particularly in regard to
the influence of the cinema. Opposition
to issues like censorship was limited, coming mainly from liberal literary
figures of both Catholic and Protestant backgrounds. On some moral issues,
however, divisions along religious lines did appear. As a senator, W.B. Yeats
protested strongly against measures to prevent divorce. Many Protestants
disapproved of gambling and were unhappy with the introduction of the Hospital
Sweepstakes. A further controversy arose in 1931 when a Protestant graduate of
Trinity College, Dublin, was appointed as county librarian for Mayo. Objections
to her lack of proficiency in Irish were soon followed by concern about the
type of books that she, as a Protestant, might make available. She was
transferred to the Department of Defence. This, however, was an exceptional
case.

Ireland’s small Jewish community began to grow in
the late nineteenth century as Jews arrived from Russia and Lithuania. The 1926
census recorded 3,686 Jews in the Irish Free State; this was to rise 3,907 by
1946. Thereafter the number declined, largely due to a high rate of emigration.
The Jewish congregation was recognised formally in the 1937 Constitution. The
Irish Free State’s first Chief Rabbi was Isaac Herzog, whose eldest son Chaim
later became president of Israel. Herzog was on friendly terms with Cardinal
MacRory and Eamon de Valera, and was honoured by representatives of Fianna
Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party before leaving to become chief rabbi in
Palestine in 1937.

Nevertheless, while Irish Jews were generally
tolerated, they were not fully accepted. During the 1930s, a decade of
increasing anti-semitism in Europe, some prominent Irish figures expressed
hostility to Jews. These included Charles Bewley, Ireland’s envoy in Berlin
from 1933 to 1939. Anti-semitic views also appeared in a number of Catholic
journals. Fr Denis Fahey and Fr Edward Cahill were particularly outspoken,
representing Jews as a threat to the Catholic Church and linking Jews with
socialism. In the context of increasing anti-semitism in Europe, civil servants
Leon Ó Broin and Frank Duff (leader of the Legion of Mary) founded the Pillar
of Fire Society in 1941 to promote dialogue between Christians and Jews.
However, their attempts foundered when John Charles McQuaid, then Archbishop of
Dublin, objected to talks by Jews at the society’s meetings.

During World War II the Department of Justice was
reluctant to allow many Jews enter the country, fearing that they would not
assimilate. After the war Robert Briscoe, Ireland’s first Jewish TD, helped
secure visas for a few Jewish refugees. The government also agreed to a plan to
bring 100 Jewish refugee children to Clonyn Castle in Delvin, Co.
Westmeath. In 1948 a contingent Jewish
children from various parts of Central Europe arrived in Ireland and stayed for
over a year before moving on; they had been admitted on the understanding that
their stay would be limited.

19. Northern Ireland, 1921-49

From the very outset it was clear that
overlapping religious and political loyalties would lead to antagonism in the
new northern state. Cardinal Logue declined an invitation to attend the opening
of the Belfast parliament in June 1921 and shortly afterwards refused to
nominate Catholic representatives to an educational committee. Like most of his
fellow Catholics, he hoped a more favourable political settlement might be
reached. The northern state emerged against a background of inter-communal
violence that lasted from the summer of 1920 to the summer of 1922. While
violence against Catholics was undoubtedly a response to events during the
struggle for independence, attacks on Catholic Church property and on Mass
goers gave it a sectarian character. Bishop Joseph MacRory and the Catholic
Protection Committee sought to highlight anti-Catholic violence, described by
some as a ‘pogrom’. Others, however, argued that the Catholic Church was not
doing enough to curb the activities of republican gunmen. Catholic nationalism
was identified with disloyalty.

Religious
denominations in Northern Ireland in 1926

Roman Catholics

Church of Ireland

Presbyterians

Methodists

Others

420, 428

320,001

303,374

49,554

73,204

Protestants constituted about two thirds of the
population of Northern Ireland at the time of partition. While most were united
in their unionism, in religious matters they differed widely. They included
Presbyterians, the Church of Ireland, Methodists, Moravians, Lutheran churches,
the Society of Friends, and a range of other groups. Their liturgies differed,
as did their church buildings: many Methodist and Presbyterian churches had
simple interiors contrasting with the more ornate buildings of the Church of
Ireland. These churches had wider religious contexts: the Church of Ireland was
part of the wider Anglican communion. Evangelicals were aware of their American
counterparts: W.P. Nicholson, an Ulster Presbyterian influenced by
fundamentalism in America, where he was ordained, proved an influential
evangelist in Northern Ireland and increased the numbers turning to religion in
the 1920s.

The Orange Order provided an opportunity for
Protestants of different denominations and social classes to celebrate a common
Protestant heritage. Many of the banners carried on Orange parades bore
illustrations of biblical scenes or Protestant churches in Northern Ireland.
The Order, which had been involved in campaigns against Home Rule since the
1880s, had significant political influence. The Ulster Unionist Council, which
governs the Ulster Unionist Party, included representatives of the Orange Order
from its inception in 1905 up to 2005. Most Unionist members of parliament
between 1921 and 1972 were members of the Order.

The
new northern government, like the Free State government, sought to curb alcohol
abuse. An intoxicating liquor act passed in 1923 prohibited the sale of alcohol
on Sundays and brought an end to ‘spirit groceries’, i.e. shops that sold both
alcohol and groceries. Debates on compensation for spirit groceries sometimes
took a sectarian turn as many spirit groceries were run by Catholics and such
premises had been targets during the violence of the previous few years. Disapproval of Sunday drinking was part of a
wider Protestant interest in keeping the Sabbath. This was also reflected in the closure of public parks on Sundays and Protestant disapproval of the
GAA’s Sunday games.

Education was a futher cause of antagonism. At the
time of partition school accommodation was seriously inadequate. The government
moved quickly to introduce reforms but the changes proposed proved very
controversial. The first two ministers of education, Lord Londonderry (1921-26)
and Lord Charlemont (1926-37), both of old Ulster families, were born and
educated in England and did not share or understand the the intense religious
fervour they found in Northern Ireland. The 1923 Education Act provided for
three classes of schools, linking the degree of public funding to public
control. What aroused particular concern was the fact that religious
instruction was to be excluded from regular school hours in schools fully
financed by public funds. In response to this provision, Presbyterian,
Methodist and Church of Ireland clerics formed a United Education Committee,
which, with the support of the Orange
Order, campaigned successfully for bible instruction in schools. A further
campaign for Protestant clerical representation on regional education
committees was also successful.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church maintained its traditional view that only
schools under the control of the Catholic Church were suitable for Catholic
children. As a result it received less financial assistance for schools than
before partition and faced considerable financial difficulties. While the
government’s educational reforms resulted in great improvements in school
accommodation, education was to prove a thorny issue for decades to come.
Catholic clerics expected nationalist politicians to promote Catholic
education. Separate schooling along with residential segregation (particularly
in Belfast and Derry), and endogamy, (the custom of marrying within one’s own
group) contributed to maintaining divisions.

These divisions hardened during the 1930s. Cardinal
MacRory offended many Protestants when he stated that the Church of Ireland was
not part of the Christian Church. The Ulster Protestant League expressed much
opposition to the Catholic Church and opposed the use of the Ulster Hall for
Catholic events. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church flourished in the face of
adversity, a matter of great pride to northern nationalist leader T.J.
Campbell. The 1930s witnessed various
open-air events to mark the fifteenth centenary of St Patrick in Ulster. Many
northern Catholics travelled to Dublin in June 1932 to participate in the
Eucharistic Congress. Nationalist
members of the northern parliament had the honour of carrying the canopy at the event. However, trains were
stoned on the return journey.

Catholic grievances in this period were highlighted
in a lengthy article entitled ‘The Real Case Against Partition’, published in
the Capuchin Annual in 1943. When
reprinted in pamphlet form with the title Orange
Terror, the northern government banned its circulation in Northern
Ireland. The incident exemplified
Catholic sense of victimhood since the formation of the state and Protestant
fears of Catholic subversion. Undoubtedly the Catholic Church’s sense of
deprivation was all the more acute as the Church’s position in the southern
state was exceptionally favourable. Meanwhile, on looking at developments south
of the border, Protestants felt their earlier fears that Home Rule would mean
Rome Rule had been justified. The situation was well summed up by Northern
Ireland Prime Minister James Craig when he told parliament in 1934, ‘… in the
South they boasted of a Catholic State. They still boast of Southern Ireland
being a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament
and a Protestant state.’

Sources:

Acheson,
Alan, A History of the Church of Ireland,
1691-1996 (Dublin, 1997).

Bowen,
Desmond, History and the Shaping of Irish
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